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Final battle nears for last of Great War greats

Lee Tate

AUSTRALIAN and British war hero Claude Choules, the last Great War soldier alive, has turned 109, and close family members believe he won't be around for next year's Anzac Day.

The veteran of both world wars, sprightly just a year ago, is virtually blind and near-deaf and was unlikely to give any further interviews, his family said after an Age visit.

One of Mr Choules' daughters, Daphne Choules-Edinger, 83, said that while his health was slipping away in a Perth nursing home, she knew of no plans by Australian or British authorities to commemorate his feats or his place in history.

But no one in the family, including Mr Choules, was bitter, she said. "There have been so many commemorations and events over a very long time."

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British-born Mr Choules has outlived 5 million others from the 1914-18 war.

He joined the Royal Navy at 13, doing odd jobs on warships, including tending to ships' mascot dogs, and became an explosives expert. He later transferred to the Royal Australian Navy.

In his Perth retirement home, Mr Choules cheerfully responds to questions shouted into his good ear. Among his wartime feats was setting tonnes of explosives around Fremantle to blow up the shipping harbour if the expected Japanese sea invasion eventuated.

Mr Choules stood on guard on the coast for the assault that never came. If the invasion had occurred, he was to pedal his bicycle 416 kilometres south to Albany to avoid capture.

Mr Choules rarely talks to outsiders. In the week of his March 3 birthday, he was visited by his three children, Daphne, Anne Pow, 80, and Adrian, 75, and many of his 11 grandchildren, 22 great-grandchildren and several great-great-grandchildren.

With British forces fighting in the First World War, 13-year-old Claude, in short pants, went to an enlistment office but was told to come back in a year. He returned in 1916 and was accepted for the Royal Navy.

In 1917 he was assigned to HMS Revenge, and while serving on the battleship he watched the surrender of the German navy in 1918, and also witnessed the scuttling of the German fleet.

Mr Choules' attitude to his long, eventful life is simple: what happened to him and the fact he survived so long was "just the way it was".

His grandson Lindsay Pow, 54, said Mr Choules had a taste of Australian life in England when he took leave from the Royal Navy to meet up with his brothers Lesley and Douglas, both Gallipoli veterans.

There were plenty of Australian Diggers in the area on leave and the brothers played footy and ate food supplied to the Diggers, which Mr Choules deemed far superior to English food.

He resolved to move to Australia and was loaned by the British Navy to the Royal Australian Navy in 1926 as an explosives instructor.

He resigned from the RAN in 1931 but stayed in the reserves and rejoined the navy in 1932 as a torpedo and anti-submarine instructor. He became an Australian citizen.

It was in his roles as torpedo officer and chief demolition officer that he was assigned to sabotaging Fremantle harbour in the event of an invasion.

Locals had already packed up and headed for safer regions away from the coast.

Mr Choules maintained an eagle eye up and down the WA coastline, sailing as far north as Broome looking for enemy ships, submarines and sea mines, which he exploded.

He loved Australia and had no intention of ever returning to Britain.

Perth freelance screenwriter Gerry Carter, who last year linked the BBC with Mr Choules for a TV documentary, said there was worldwide interest in the war veteran. "He is the ultimate survivor,'' he said.

Mr Choules was married to Ethel for 80 years, believed to be a world record, until her death at 98.

- While Mr Choules is the last WW1 serviceman, Florence Green (born 1901), who served as a waitress in an RAF officers' mess for a few months before war's end, is still alive in England and is recognised as a veteran.